Freedom

by: Kim Weissman
July 4, 1999

On July
4th, it is the custom in this country to celebrate our Freedom, although the occasion has
become more an excuse to hold backyard barbecues and shoot off fireworks, than a calm
reflection of what it is, exactly, we are celebrating. As the 20th century draws to a
close, how free are we, really?

On this date 223 years ago, we proclaimed our Freedom
from an oppressive government with the stirring words contained in our Declaration of
Independence. In the intervening 223 years, have we maintained our Freedom? Many people
would say yes, indeed, we have increased our Freedom. Some segments of our population,
which were denied the Freedom enjoyed by white males in the 18th century, certainly do
enjoy more Freedom today. It is ironic that the very groups whose Freedom has grown the
most over the past 223 years – minorities and women – are the same groups most
critical of the very Constitutional system which made the expansion of their Freedom
possible. But what of the nation as a whole?

Writing shortly after our revolution, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville observed that
in America, most people could live their whole lives without once coming into
contact with an agent of the government. Such an ideal is clearly no longer true,
it is today virtually impossible for an American to go a single day without coming into
contact with, or being affected by, some agent or agency of the government. Our federal
government has become ubiquitous, worming its way into every nook and cranny of our lives.
The Federal Register, that compendium of orders issued to the American people from
Washington defining what we can or cannot do, what we must or must not do, grows by tens
of thousands of pages every year.

Every year we are forced to work longer just to pay our tax tribute to the government.
This year, Cost of Government Day (that day when we stop working for the government and
start working for ourselves and our families) is June 22. According to the Americans for
Tax Reform, Americans will work 173 days of the year just to pay the cost of government:
123 days to pay for government spending, another 50 days to pay for the regulatory burden.
The good news is that the Cost of Government Day has moved backward nearly a month since
hitting an all-time high of July 18 in 1992. The bad news is that we are still
working nearly half the year for the government.

There are other indicia of our loss of Freedom, of course, such as the level of
intrusion of government into our lives and our privacy. Late last year, the Federal
Reserve Board proposed their now-infamous "Know your Customer" regulations,
which would have turned every banker into a snoop for the federal government, requiring
them to report "suspicious transactions" for federal scrutiny, allegedly to
combat drug money laundering. The FDIC opened up the process for public comment, and was
overwhelmed by a flood of negative reactions. Over 15,000 comments were received (the
average new bank regulation usually draws a few hundred comments), all but 12 negative.
The proposed regulations were eventually withdrawn, with the comment from an FDIC
spokesman that "…we are going to have to do something different than what was
proposed."

We now know what that "something different" is. Allegedly in
an effort to crack down on parents who owe child support, the government is now expanding
it’s massive data monitoring system (the National Directory of New Hires) to include
banking and financial holdings, in addition to existing data on the employment status,
income, and other personal information on nearly every adult in the country. As
the Washington Post put it, never before have federal officials had the legal authority or
the technological ability "…to keep tabs on Americans accused of nothing."

The officials in charge of this Orwellian intrusion learned their lesson from the
"Know your Customer" debacle. This expanded assault on our privacy is claimed to
be for the benefit of "the children", the standard excuse used so
effectively by this administration to curtail so many of our freedoms. And this time, they
are trying to sneak it by without public comment, because it is merely an expansion of an
existing system (begun in 1997 in the name of welfare reform), not new regulations. One
official proclaimed "…the need for people to support their children far
outweighs their need for privacy."

Thus because a tiny percentage of parents avoid their responsibilities, the entire
population are treated as criminals. The Administration for Children and Families, part of
HHS, runs the program, and according to a former ACF official, "What
we’re now going to do is put a system into place that will track the earnings and
comings and goings of the entire adult population of the U.S. In a free society, we should
always be on the lookout for the possibility we do harm through good intentions."
Indeed. The primary motivating attitude of our government has become the belief that every
single American is some sort of criminal, presuming our guilt, and requiring us to prove
our innocence by opening every detail of our lives to the scrutiny of snooping federal
bureaucrats.

This is not the way the government of a free republic is supposed to work. It certainly
is not the way the Founders envisioned it; although there were some at the time of
ratification, the anti-federalists, who feared the development of precisely what we see
today:

"...the proposed plan of government...is a most daring attempt to
establish a despotic aristocracy among freemen that the world has ever witnessed."
—Centinel (anti-federalist Samuel Bryan, 1787).

"I see great jeopardy in this new government." "I look upon
that paper [the Constitution] as the most fatal plan that could possibly be conceived to
enslave a free people. If such be your rage for novelty, take it and welcome; but you
shall never have my consent." —Patrick Henry (speech before the
Virginia ratifying convention, 1788).

Richard Henry Lee (who introduced the motion leading to the Declaration of Independence
and was a signer of that document) opposed the Constitution without a Bill of Rights, and
called it "elective despotism".

It was because of the perceived dangers of the Constitution standing alone, that
some of the states refused to ratify it without the inclusion of a Bill of Rights which
would explicitly protect certain fundamental rights retained by the people, rights
which were deemed so vital as to require special protection.

James Madison, the federalist called the father of the Constitution, initially could
not see the utility of a Bill of Rights, given the structure of the government which had
been created, a structure which had no power whatsoever except that specifically delegated
to it: "If no such power be expressly delegated, and if it be not both necessary and
proper to carry into execution an express power… the answer must be that the federal
government is destitute of all such authority." Madison feared that a Bill of Rights
would eventually lead people to believe that any right not specifically mentioned in the
Bill of Rights was not protected.

Certain elements of our population and political elite
have gone so far in misrepresenting our Constitution as to have completely turned it on
its head. They act as though the government has the power to do anything,
unless specifically prohibited by the Constitution, which is precisely the reverse of the
original structure. The Bill of Rights, that last barrier to
government tyranny, has become merely a parchment barrier to the government encroachment
of our rights. Not only are our inherent rights which are not mentioned in
the Bill of Rights at risk, despite the Ninth Amendment ("The enumeration in the
Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others
retained by the people"), but even those rights which are specifically
protected are impaired, are at risk, and in many instances, have already been
tremendously diminished by the activities of our government.

The free exercise of religion and the ban against taking private property without just
compensation are specifically protected by our Bill of Rights, yet are in danger of
disappearing.

Also among those rights protected by the Bill of Rights is the
right which our Founders and a majority of the people at that time deemed essential to
protect and defend all the rest: the right to keep and bear arms. We have
just witnessed a century in which more than 100 million people (by one estimate double
that, not including wars) have been slaughtered by their own governments. And yet, despite
our Bill of Rights, we are currently engaged in a debate over gun confiscation
– make no mistake, that’s exactly what it is -- a debate in which our
government contends that it alone should have a monopoly of force. We will all be
safer if that were so, they say. Because what has happened time and again around the world
can never happen here. How many of those 100 million dead paid with their lives for
believing exactly that? Our Second Amendment is the
insurance which the Founders gave us, so that we would retain our rights against an
overbearing government, to make sure that it does not happen here.

Perhaps the most fundamental reason that our Freedom is at risk today is the ignorance
most people have about our founding documents, and the circumstances under which those
documents, and our nation, came into being. Even more troubling, however, is the
active hostility many people in this country harbor toward the philosophy that
those founding documents represent.

Nowhere has this been more starkly demonstrated than in an ongoing dispute in New
Jersey over the Declaration of Independence. It was proposed that, along with the pledge
of allegiance, students begin their school day with a recitation of the following phrase
from the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving
their just powers from the consent of the governed."

Many members of the New Jersey legislature, as well as many in the general public, have
expressed outrage against the proposal. Opponents have called
this phrase, and the Declaration of Independence itself, racist, sexist, exclusionary,
outmoded, a secular prayer, and a stealth attempt to introduce conservative values into
schools. When California enacted a similar law, opponents claimed that it was
calculated to teach fascism. Some in the New Jersey legislature propose to "reword"
the phrase to make it more politically correct (change "men" to
"persons", for example). Fixed truths, unalienable rights, reference to a
Creator, government authority dependent on the consent of the governed…it’s no
wonder that the big government elitists are uncomfortable with that philosophy. The New
Jersey bill has been shelved for further study by "experts".

One editorialist suggested the real fear of the naysayers is that the school
children might actually take that phrase from the Declaration seriously. If that has
them worried, consider the sentence immediately following that which was proposed: "That
whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the
people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation
on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most
likely to effect their safety and happiness."

The inclusion of that following sentence in the daily recitation was no doubt
considered too inflammatory, even by those offering the original proposal. But Jefferson
went even further. He wrote, not merely about the right of the people, but their duty as
well: "But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing
invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is
their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for
their future security."

Such ideas are anathema to the elitists who run our government, most of our
institutions, and who would run our lives for us if they could. It is no wonder that they
decline to teach such ideas to children in government schools. They do
not want too many people to understand what our Founders actually intended: that the
founding documents of our republic established the superiority of the people over their
government.

Our Freedom, and our rights which defend
that Freedom – all of our rights – are not granted to us at the
sufferance of our government. It is our government which derives its just powers from our
consent. Freedom means that We, the People, are in charge; that we are the masters of our
government, not its servants. It is we, through our Constitution, who have established the
rules by which government must abide. July 4th – Independence Day – is the recurring
reminder of that fact.

[additional formatting by TYSK]

The above article is the property of Kim
Weissman, and is reprinted with his permission.